“Hm, easier said than done. As Virgil says, Facilis descensus Averno.”
“The way to Hell is easy,” John translates, his eyes darting between me and the sharply curving road.
“But the way back isn’t. Look at poor Euridice—thrown back into the pit because her husband, Orpheus, couldn’t resist a backward glance.”
John steals another look at me. “True. I might have a hard time keeping my eyes off you during the trip.”
I blush at the compliment, surprised at how quickly he’s taken the conversation from geology to mythology to flirtation. I’m not sure where he means to take it next—or how far I want him to go. Now that his eyes are back on the twists of the road, I study his profile, noticing the bump in his nose where it looks like it was broken and the faint scar near his jawline. It’s not a pretty face, but it’s a strong one—like a Roman general who’s been in the field. And those eyes. When he turns those lavender eyes on me, I find myself not wanting him to stop…at least not yet.
“Well, I’ll just have to lead the way,” I say.
He keeps his eyes on the road, but I see his lips curve into a smile. Then we go into a tunnel and I can’t see anything.
When we emerge from the tunnel, the Gulf of Pozzuoli is before us, its calm blue expanse, cradled protectively by Cape Misenum, belying the surging magma beneath. “That’s where Pliny the Elder watched the eruption from,” I say, pointing to the cape, glad to be back in the safer realm of ancient history and geography for the moment. I turn my head back to look in the direction of Naples and Vesuvius, trying to imagine what the view would have been like on that fateful morning. A cloud like an umbrella pine was how Pliny the Younger described the emissions that issued out of Vesuvius in his letter to Tacitus describing his uncle’s death, but I can’t see the volcano from this angle.
“We’ll have an excellent view where we’re going,” he says. “And hopefully a more tranquil one than Pliny’s.”
“Good,” I say as we follow the coast road to Baia. “After all the excitement today, I could do with a little tranquillity. I have to say I’m really surprised—and a little embarrassed, considering I recommended her for this project—that Agnes would be foolish enough to go into those tunnels.”
“What makes you think it was Agnes’s idea?” he asks, his eyes flicking off the road for a moment to look at me.
“Oh, I didn’t…I mean, I thought it was probably Simon’s idea, but I’m surprised she would go along with it.” I glance at him and see that his eyes are back on the road. “Why do you think Simon was willing to risk his life and Agnes’s in those tunnels?” I ask.
“I’m afraid it’s my fault,” he says, “I’m the one who should be embarrassed. Ah, here’s where we turn off….” He turns the car ata sign for Lake Lucrino—famous in ancient times for its oyster beds—and we climb into low hummocky hills on a narrow twisting road that demands all John’s attention. He turns in at an entrance that is nearly hidden behind oleander bushes, driving down a lane bordered by tall hedges alive with small brightly colored birds and tiny white flowers. I smell jasmine and salt and hear birdsong and breaking surf. The lane opens up to a promontory overlooking the sea and a low stucco building with a green clay tile roof. Next to the building is a patio set with wrought-iron tables.
“Is it open?” I ask, noticing that the patio is empty. There’s only one car in the driveway.
“Oh yes, I know the owner,” John says, parking the car. “But it’s a little early for dinner. We could take a walk first—there are some ruins along the ridge here—if you’re not too tired.”
“Not at all,” I tell him. It’s true; although I should be exhausted from everything that’s happened today, when I open the car door and smell the sea and the sharp tang of rosemary and pine in the air, I don’t feel tired at all.
We walk up a narrow dirt trail behind the low building. The path is steep for a bit, and rocky—John offers his arm over the rougher parts—but then it flattens out on the top of the ridge. I see the remains of a tile floor beneath the grass and a few low stone walls.
“A Republican villa,” John says, “probably built around Cicero’s day when this area became popular as a retreat for wealthy Romans. Not as fancy as the ones closer to Baia”—he points down toward the fishing village below us—“but it had a pretty view.”
I nod, speechless at just how perfect the view is. To the east, I see all the way across the Gulf of Pozzuoli to Naples and the cone of Vesuvius. To the south is Cape Misenum and the deep blue of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Below us lies Lake Lucrino and a little farther west another lake, which I guess is Lake Averno and which the ancients believed was the entrance to the underworld.
“You were going to tell me why you thought it was your fault that Simon went into the tunnels,” I say, sitting down on the stone wall.
John sighs and sits next to me. “Yes, I think I may have given him the idea to look for something there. You see, I’ve wondered whether the eighteenth-century tunnels might lead us to the stairway that went down to the underground passages and the sea grotto. In the plan of the villa we found there’s an entrance to the stairs from the lower courtyard. But then the rest of the plan is blank. It doesn’t show what was on the level beneath the lower courtyard. When I read Phineas’s description of seeing Iusta swimming below the terrace and his conjecture that there must be a sea grotto on the lowest level, I felt sure that there must be a way to find those stairs.”
“And you mentioned that to Simon?”
“I’m afraid so. He came to me the night before last concerned there might not be much more work for him because he’s almost finished the paintings in the courtyard. I told him that it depended on what we found next, that I’d like to reproduce the murals in the lower levels, but obviously we couldn’t do that until we uncovered those levels.”
I think about the little bit of the conversation I overheard between the two men. It didn’t sound like they were talking about their business arrangement, but then, I only overhead a small part of the conversation. Still, I’m sure Lyros is leaving something out of his account of the conversation: certainly the part where he admonished Simon for indulging rumors about cults and sacrifices.
“So you think Simon was looking for a way into the stairs?”
“Why else would there have been a collapse? Those tunnels have been there for centuries. He must have been doing a little tunneling himself—boring holes into the walls hoping to find the stairs to the underground passages—and he managed to undermine one of the supports. It’s ironic, really.”
“Ironic?”
“Yes. The cave-in he inadvertently caused did uncover the stairs. And from the glimpse I had of that painted swan, I think we’ll find some spectacular murals. But it doesn’t look as if Simon will be in any shape to reproduce them any time soon.”
“That is unlucky,” I agree. “For Simon, at least.”
“I’m afraid this isn’t the first stroke of bad luck the project’s had.”
“You mean the shooting in Texas?” I ask.
“Actually I’d call that a tragedy, not bad luck. I was thinking of smaller bits of bad luck: tools have gone missing from the site, a strange stain appeared on the north courtyard wall, and right after that noxious fumes started emanating from the tunnels. On July 10, a workman fell off a ladder—” I think again of the cardboard tile of the man falling off a ladder. Is that what the cards are about? A warning that the Villa della Notte is cursed?
I’m distracted from this thought by something else John is saying. “…and then there are the triangles showing up on everything.”
“What triangles?” I ask, my skin prickling.
“Since May we’ve been finding triangles on everything. One was spray-painted on the site gate in Herculaneum and one on the door to the villa on Capri the next day. I’ve found three stamped on our mail and one punched into the tires of the institute’s truck, and just two days ago there was even one scratched into the side o
f the Parthenope.”
“What kind of triangles?” I ask, cutting short his list.
“Oh,” he says, reaching into his pocket. “Here’s one I found today. It came with the mail.” He removes a postcard—the kind that’s blank on one side—and hands it to me.
The triangle is formed of ten dots, each one printed in red ink. A tetraktys.
“Do you know what this is?” I ask.
“No,” he says, “but I think you do. Do you want to tell me about it?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Well, then, we’d better eat while you talk. You look a little pale. Shall we?” He offers his arm for the walk down to the restaurant and I take it. Suddenly I’m feeling unsteady on my feet.
“I’ve always thought that if I had been paying more attention it wouldn’t have happened,” I tell John Lyros on the patio of the restaurant. The waiter has brought us a ceramic pitcher filled with crisp white wine and scattered a handful of tiny fried fish and calamari over the brown butcher-paper-covered table, sprinkling them with coarse sea salt and lemon juice before discreetly retreating at a look from John. I can see that it will be a leisurely dinner, giving me lots of time to tell my story. Even the sun seems to be hesitating in its descent over Cumae, the sky melting in slow degrees from bright blue to lavender to indigo. “But I got pregnant and that’s all I was really thinking about. By the time I realized that Ely had joined the Tetraktys, he was already deeply involved.”
“What happened to the baby?” John asks.
“I went into premature labor on the day I found out about the Tetraktys. We lost her, Cory, three days later.”
“I’m sorry,” John says, grimacing.
I nod and look out over the water. For a moment I smell sulfur and I can feel the prickle of cottonwood spores on my skin. I remember Ely’s face when he came out of the Tetraktys house, how I saw myself transformed by his look into a monster. A siren, I think now, one of Persephone’s companions punished for her carelessness. If I’d been paying closer attention Ely wouldn’t have drifted into the Tetraktys. If I’d been enough for him, he wouldn’t have needed it.
“Surely that must have been sufficient reason for him to leave the cult.”
“No,” I say. “He felt more than ever that he had to figure out why we’d lost Cory and that the explanation somehow lay in numbers. He thought the day of her birth—June 17—was unlucky…” I falter, remembering suddenly that Gianni had said the same thing. He said that the middle card—La Disgrazia—stood for the number seventeen, which was considered unlucky.
“Huh,” John says, “that’s interesting. The Romans thought seventeen was unlucky, too.” He takes out a pen from his shirt pocket and writes a Roman numeral on the butcher paper: XVII. “See, if you rearrange the letters you get the Latin word VIXI.”
“I lived,” I translate. “The perfect tense of the verb to live. What’s wrong with that?”
“Well, as you know, the perfect tense always refers to an action completed in the past….”
“Oh, so it means ‘I’m dead now.’ I see.” I wonder why John Lyros knows such a thing. Is he, like Ely, obsessed with numbers? It seems an odd coincidence, but I push it away. After all, in addition to studying classics, Lyros also studied mathematics and founded a computer software company. It makes sense that he’d be interested in numbers. “Well, Ely didn’t mention that, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he knew it. He was obsessed with numbers and had an uncanny memory for them. He remembered the exact date of every important event in his life, and if you gave him any date, in the past or the future, he could tell you what day of the week it fell on.”
“He might have been a talented mathematician—” he begins.
“Or suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder,” I finish for him. “I wanted him to see a psychiatrist. He did just once. When the doctor suggested taking an antidepressant, he balked and refused to go back. He wouldn’t medicate away ‘his gift,’ as he called his ability to see number patterns. He thought it was the only way to see the world clearly. He thought Pythagoras had had the same gift: an ability to see mathematical patterns in the natural world and so make sense of the world, to discover its laws, in a way no one else could have.”
“He may have been right,” Lyros says, “but he couldn’t have been easy to live with. How much longer after you lost your baby did he stay?”
“Six months,” I answer. “Nearly to the day. He left just before Christmas. Actually, he left on the solstice—” I try to smile, but find that my lips, coated with the salt from the fried seafood, feel stiff.
“Another numerically significant day,” John says, nodding.
“Yes,” I say, wondering how John knows that the Tetraktys assigned special significance to the solstices and equinoxes. But then, so do a lot of New Age groups. Another coincidence? I take a long gulp of the crisp white wine and stare hard at the line on the horizon where the dark blue of the sky meets the lavender sea, then at the lemon wedges on the table and the bloodred oleander blossoms edging the terrace. I’m trying to concentrate on these details rather than relive the day when Ely left our house in Hyde Park for the Tetraktys community in New Mexico. Telling this story has taken more out of me than I thought it would.
“You were probably better off that he left,” John says, a little brutally I think, but it feels good, like the bracing wind coming off the sea now that the sun has almost set. “A man on a religious mission is not good company, not even to himself.”
“And you know this because…”
He smiles wryly. The waiter’s appearance with a bowl of steaming mussels allows him to delay answering, but when he’s gone, John cracks open a shell and, spearing a dark purple mussel, carries on as if there had been no interruption. “I know from personal experience. I was on a quest once myself.”
“That trek in the Himalayas to find yourself?” I ask.
He laughs so hard he spills the broth from a mussel shell on the cuff of his white shirt. “I see I’m not the only one who’s done a bit of cyber-stalking! It’s hard to believe I was ever young enough to use a phrase like that. Finding myself!”
“Well, did you?” I pop a mussel in my mouth. I have to stop myself from sighing at the explosion of flavor, like the whole sea contained in the silky morsel.
“Find myself?” he repeats, still laughing. But when I continue to hold his gaze, he purses his lips and nods, serious. “I found, I suppose, the limits of myself, the borders. How far I could go on how little food or how little sleep—even how little oxygen on the top of those mountains. I think that’s why men—and women,” he adds at a lifted eyebrow from me, “pit themselves against the elements. And it is useful information. I won’t deny that. But after a couple of years I felt as if I knew my outlines—” He lifts his hands and holds them a foot apart, giving the space in between them a little shake so that I can almost feel the weight of the air cupped between his large sturdy hands. “As though I were a cartoon figure the artist hadn’t filled in. I was no closer to really understanding what was inside.” He lowers his hands and lets one rest on the center of his chest. “So I came back and went to work—”
“You founded Lyrik,” I fill in, “and then sold it ten years later.”
“You have done your homework,” he says, holding up his glass of wine to me.
“But I couldn’t find anything else about you for the next few years, the time in between selling the company and founding the Lyrik Institute. Is that when you went on your spiritual quest?”
He turns his head away, toward the sea, so I’m looking at his profile. “Yes, like your ex-boyfriend I thought the answers might lie in ancient cultures. I’d always been interested in the classics because, I suppose, I thought that if you could go back to the beginnings of civilization, to that moment when primitive man becomes rational man, you could glimpse the essence of what man is. So I founded the institute to pursue archaeological digs—in Samos, Delphi, Eleusis, Cape Sounion. And then I
came here”—he sweeps his arm in a wide arc, taking in the panoramic view—“to this amazing land. There’s Lake Avernus—the entrance to the underworld according to Virgil. And beyond that, along the western coast, is Cumae, the oldest Greek colony in the western world, where the Sibyl foretold the history of Rome and, according to some revisionist church historians, the birth of Christ from her cave.” John turns around and points east across the gulf toward Pozzuoli. “And there’s ancient Puteoli where St. Paul first stepped on Italian soil in AD 61 and San Gennaro was martyred in AD 305. It’s like we’re at the epicenter of some great spiritual center here.”
He swerves his head back to me suddenly—his pupils contracted from staring at the sky to tiny purple dots in a sea of lilac—and I remember the impression I had, when I looked at his picture, that his eyes had absorbed the colors of all the seas and mountains and skies he had looked upon. In real life, with those eyes trained on me, the impression is even more startling, as if he could absorb my very essence.
“Funny,” I say. “That’s what Ely used to say about our neighborhood in Hyde Park.”
John starts to say something but pauses while the waiter serves our main course from a platter of whole grilled fish, octopus, and small Mediterranean lobsters—nearly as small as the crayfish I used to catch in the creek behind my grandparents’ ranch. When the waiter leaves John asks, “Do you think your boyfriend—”
“Ex,” I correct.
He smiles and I realize belatedly that I sound like I’m flirting. It must be the wine, I think, taking another sip of the nearly colorless liquid. It’s so light and crisp it’s like drinking water, but clearly it’s a little more potent.
“You think your ex-boyfriend Ely and this group, the…what did you call it?”
“The Tetraktys,” I say, wondering if John’s a little drunk himself that he’s forgetting the name of a cult I told him not half an hour ago.
“You think the Tetraktys might be interested in the Papyrus Project?”
The Night Villa Page 22